It’s like voting, only a lot more complicated

J. Patrick Coolican and Michael J. Mishak

Monday, Dec. 3, 2007 | 7:12 a.m.

A group of four Democrats had gathered inside a tidy mobile home in Las Vegas last week to hear about something called a caucus.

Ryan Donohue, a field operative for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, made a pitch for the candidate and relayed some basic information about the contest.

One key point: You have to go to your caucus location, which is likely to be a school or community center or another public spot, on Jan. 19.

And you have to be on time. Get there at 11 a.m., please.

Otherwise, your vote won't be counted.

"So, you really have to show up on time?" asked Mark Burke, a voter who's committed to Clinton. Once this fact sunk in, Burke became a gem for the Clinton team: Repeating obvious caucus essentials so they didn't have to.

"So we really need to be there on the 19th and on time," he told his fellow Clinton friends. And then: We should bring Clinton supporters with us.

The scene was one of countless similar ones over recent months showing how far the campaigns have to go to get their voters up to speed on the caucus.

A caucus isn't like normal voting. It's a public meeting. Support isn't gauged by tallying votes. It is measured by the number of people who physically stand together to support each candidate. Absentee ballots and early voting don't exist. Each caucus site selects delegates, who are apportioned to candidates based on the number of supporters who show up. Those delegates then go to the county convention for their candidate, and a certain number of them will be elected to the state convention and then finally the Democratic National Convention in the summer.

Got that?

If not, don't worry, you aren't alone. It hasn't been easy getting Nevada Democrats to understand the concept.

Misunderstandings are common. Campaign workers say some voters believe they must pay to participate in the party-run event (it's free), while others are waiting for an invitation (you'll get calls from campaigns, no doubt, but no formal invitation.) Still others think they can caucus at local shopping malls and grocery stores, where they are accustomed to voting early in elections (nope).

With that in mind, the campaigns are showing a sense of urgency, as the 50-day countdown approaches and the task of caucus education and strategy becomes priority one.

Moreover, Nevada, once the dirty stepchild of the nomination process, is looking more and more important on the Democratic side. Here's why: If Illinois Sen. Barack Obama or former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards wins Iowa on Jan. 3 - Obama is ahead in a recent ABC News poll - and Clinton comes back with a Jan. 8 New Hampshire victory, much will be riding on Nevada 11 days later. It will be seen as a tiebreaker of sorts.

The state Democratic Party has been conducting its own mock caucus events, though campaign aides say the party's effort sometimes gets bogged down with foreboding terms such as "viability" and the mathematics of "delegate apportionment," all of which alienates potential caucusgoers.

(Note to reader: Just don't worry about it. Go to your caucus site, which will be announced soon, and stand with the other people who support your candidate.)

The campaigns' concerns were on full display during a training session for union members at the Nevada AFL-CIO's annual convention in Reno in August.

Andres Ramirez, outreach director for the state Democrats, had hoped to recruit members as "temporary chairs," meaning party representatives who effectively run individual caucus meetings. About 50 union members filed in after a lunch break, with hundreds of others apparently opting to get a head start on the Lake Tahoe booze cruise set for that evening.

Ramirez started in, reinforcing that caucuses do not have absentee balloting or early voting. He asked how many attendees had ever participated in a caucus. Five hands shot up.

Then Ramirez began explaining the details. "This is where it gets exciting, and this is where most of you will stop paying attention," Ramirez said.

Indeed, a quarter of the way through the presentation, members were literally scratching their heads. Some groaned. One man just gave up, resting his head on a conference table.

Another training session, staged last week at Legacy High School in North Las Vegas, went better. About 400 students hooted and hollered as if at a pep rally, and in the end, 60 students registered to vote.

But campaigns aren't relying on these party events.

The Clinton camp announced its own education initiative last week, to include caucus trainings, a Web site and a hotline.

The other campaigns are also training their supporters, though they're also beginning to educate their volunteer leaders in caucus strategy, which entails poaching voters from other candidates while in the caucus room, using persuasion and horse trading.

At a small meeting for precinct captains at Edwards headquarters last week, Greg Leifer's briefing to his troops left some struggling to understand. As he explained, if after the first round of voting a competing candidate doesn't get the necessary minimum number of votes to be "viable," they can poach those voters for Edwards.

"This is where it gets interesting," Leifer said. "The better you can talk about John, the better you know your neighbor, the better you can persuade them to come to John."

Sometimes, the captains looked a little lost.

Not to worry, said Edwards' aides, who describe the training as an evolutionary process that is just beginning.

In the Obama camp, a meeting of 88 precinct captains was crisp while being rowdy when field operative Jason Green wanted his troops to make noise. Obama's campaign said that during 72 hours the previous week it had 17 meetings like this one for precinct captains, which began with campaign updates and a timeline on what will happen between now and Jan. 19, and ended with a mock caucus.

John Gilbert, an Obama field operative, led them through the process: "You're going to be very tactical. You're going to say, 'We've got 21.' And you'll know that going in because you know your precinct so well. You'll say, 'Just what I thought.' And you'll know there are 19 for Clinton and four undecided."

Once the second-tier candidates are declared not viable, and the undecideds are in their corner, the scramble will begin, he said: "They're up for grabs." Indeed they are.

Capisce?